Top Chef: Noteable Bravo Blog Quotes

Anthony Bourdain:

...the Trial of The Chicken is traditionally seen as a near religious passage, a station of the cross, an early task on the One True Path to chefdom. Just as it is widely believed that "you can tell everything you need to know about a cook by how he makes an omelet", the cooking of a simple chicken makes an open book of whoever prepared it.

I don't care how fine Brian's “Sausage Shepherd's Pie (with Chicken)” tasted. Let's assume it was indeed, delicious. Spectacularly so. I would argue that it was an effort more redolent of chickenshit than actual chicken.

Ted Allen:

Let’s put aside Top Chef’s decision to portray him as the sweet, lovable gay guy. Dale has capital-B balls.

Rocco DiSpirito:

At the Judge’s Table [Sara] tried to tell some story about how she is reserved. Yeah, like a banjo at a square dance.

[Dale] said something about how you could tell who got laid the night before by their food. If that is true, I would hate to know what happened to him the night before this challenge when he decided to do a duet of two things, neither of which tasted good.

Modern Food Writing

I got a delightful laugh out of this news blip from the Grub Street of New York Magazine. Today, Slate published an article by Paul Levy, in which the writer states why he is leaving the food writing business. Besides an incredibly sexist attitude, Paul states:

Over the years, I've done my best to write seriously about food, assuming my readers are an educated audience who would get (and smile or learnedly chuckle at) allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Damon Runyon, readers who would understand cryptic puns and whose jaws would not slacken when asked whether they knew "the land where the lemon trees bloom?"

Well now, that would explain why you're flopping about so desperately in the modern world of food writing. Look: while we foodies appreciate art as much as the next fellow, we don't want to have to check an encyclopedia to understand how an egg was cooked. Food is a common experience to all life forms. A food writer - like any good journalist - should speak to the common person, not to the elite crowd of snub-nosed alumni of Ivy League Schools. Levy points this out well to himself:

No editor today, for example, would be content with the way I dealt with durian, the cherished oriental fruit that looks like a giant hand grenade, which I wrote about for the Observer in 1984: "Some find the smell excremental, some find it reminiscent of sick." I'd now be booed off the fellas' food-writing team for excessive gentility. Today the correct vocabulary is shit and puke.

30 years ago, that was the correct vocabulary too.

Writing needs to be honest. It is what writers are supposed to be; exquisite at lying and bluntly honest with the same tongue. Levy's desire for esoteric chat about cuisine and a polite vocabulary is Victorian at best. Only the few left in that aged circle actually care for that kind of discourse.

As Grub Street puts it:

If this is what we’re missing, bring on the barbarians. Food writing is too important to leave to gentlemen.

Amen, dear comrades, and farewell to the past.